The Little Things - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Ever watch a film that you feel like is right up your alley, that you should be loving everything about, but it just doesn’t connect? It’s as if you can see all of the elements of a film that you’d otherwise love to watch, but how they’re being used just falls flat. That’s my conundrum with John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things. A great cast with Denzel Washington as the obsessive former detective, Rami Malek as the up-and-coming hotshot homicide cop, and Jared Leto as Jared Leto; this film should be a knock-out murder mystery thriller, but instead it just knocked me out cold.

Playing to staple good cops who have done bad things pictures like Insomnia (both versions), The Little Things strives for the thoughtfully introspective thriller in the vein of Sean Penn's The Pledge while delivering the excitement of a routine pulp serial killer picture. We watch as Washington’s old-timer Decon injects himself into the case while Malek’s hotshot Baxter attempts to control a chain of evidence to create a solid case against their perp. The man in question is Leto as oddball refrigerator repairman and crime aficionado, Sparma. But knowing you’ve got the guy, and proving it are two very different things.

This is my second time through The Little Things, and admittedly, it took me at least two tries to get through each viewing. I wouldn’t call myself bored by it; there’s certainly enough going on to hold your attention, and the performances are excellent, but I just wanted something to happen. It felt like any time Hancocks’ dimestore detective pulp novel screenplay was just about to get going, get some excitement under its feet, our Old School and New School detectives stop to have a bizarrely cryptic, thoughtful semi-examination about “what it all means…” conversation. Or the film just plain stops. And at just over two hours, The Little Things burns a lot of deliberately plodding shoe leather; right up to the finale. 

Part of the issue with all this downtime for a murder mystery aficionado like myself is that it allows the audience too much time to guess what will happen next. And because this isn’t a whodunit where the identity of the killer isn’t a mystery, we’re left waiting for something to happen that pits this cat-and-mouse suspense against our detectives and Sparma, but that never really happens. Instead, we get this unsatisfying version of the third act of Se7en that again, much like the rest of the film, doesn’t go anywhere surprising nor does it lead to something satisfying. Compared to something like Insomnia (again, either version), there’s a real tension between our detective and killer. There are stakes for how events transpire. There are consequences for whatever actions are taken. Here, whatever happens is allowed to drift away in a haze of dust and smoke without resolution.

For another take on the film, here’s what Bryan Kluger had to say about the film on Blu-ray

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 
The Little Things haunts 4K UHD with a single-disc release from Warner Bros. The film is pressed on a BD100 disc (but doesn’t use even 70 gigs of that space), and is housed in a standard black case. There wasn’t a slipcover for the review copy, and no digital code.

A moody, atmospheric, and shadowy Neo-Noir detective flick deserves to enjoy a robust Dolby Vision transfer. While there are plenty of daylight sequences, a solid majority of the film takes place either at night or in very creepy, shadow-drenched locations. The first time I tried watching it was on streaming, and I never like to use that experience as a metric for successful image replication. With a stable data stream and nice, robust bitrate, those shadowy locations with limited light sources pick up some visual life. I don’t have the Blu-ray to look back to, so I can’t offer a comparison there. Details are sharp and crisp without looking processed or enhanced. No artifiacting that I could pinpoint for compression issues. Black levels are rich and inky; again, those shadows are striking now and lend some depth to the image. Colors are robust, but not going out of their way to be too striking. It’s a murder mystery after all, but flesh tones look healthy and primaries get their time to shine during those daylight sequences.

For the audio, we have a solid Atmos audio track that adds a little extra heft when compared to its DTS-HD MA 5.1 counterpart on this disc. The main things I felt were that this Atmos mix was a bit more present, a bit louder, a bit more pronounced with sound effects, and the Thomas Newman score is a bit more evocative for those brooding moments. Flipping between tracks, I didn’t notice much difference in terms of surround and rear placements, at least not during some of the more routine moments. But for a sequence like where Washington is escaping over a roof after an illegal search for evidence, there’s a bit more spread and pronounced overhead activity in the Atmos; a bit more echoing drift for the police sirens, but not anything to “wow” over. It’s an effective Atmos mix, but I’m not entirely sold that it delivers a more impactful experience than the DTS-HD MA 5.1, which achieves many of the same goals. 

As for the bonus features, we get the same two flimsy featurettes as the Blu-ray, but now we have a trailer, so instead of 17 minutes of extras, we now have almost twenty. 

• The Little Things - Four Shades of Blue (HD 9:22)
• A Contrast in Styles (HD 7:54)
• Trailer

Love it or hate it, I generally try to give films multiple opportunities to prove themselves. If it was bad the first time, maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, or I was too damn tired or sick to enjoy it. If it was great, same thing, maybe I was giddied up on too much sugar, coffee, or nostalgia to be objective. John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things, on paper, is a movie I should love. It’s got a lot of the things I love to see and look for in a detective thriller. But something about how these elements were mixed together for this story just pulled me out of it. Too ponderous when what it’s trying to say isn’t that deep. Too inert when it’s also trying to build suspense and tension. Washington and Malek have a strong interplay, and Leto gets to deliver another appropriately weird Leto performance. But none of these Oscar-winning actors is given much to do or say that’d make this routine, been-there-seen-that thriller stand out. After two viewings, I really wanted to like this movie; I just didn’t.

But, for those who did like and want it in 4K, I have good news for you - the disc is solid. The Dolby Vision transfer is a nice piece of work, certainly a significant upgrade over the streaming experience. The Atmos mix may not be the most aggressive piece of work, but it does its job. The bonus features aren’t much to think of. At the end of the day, I’ll call it Worth A Look. I have to call it that because in the back of my head, I feel like I should give it another watch again someday, even if it might not change my mind any.